Multinational banking and financial services company Standard Chartered (SC) has announced that it is developing a blockchain pilot for bank guarantees with the use of R3 Corda blockchain technology.

 

In collaboration with Siemens’ financing arm Siemens Financial Services (SFS) and trade finance platform TradeIX, the pilot started its operations back in March and seeks to be finished by the end of 2018.

If proven to be successful, the project would “digitize trade and leverage real-time data to deliver efficiency gains and transform the way trade finance is conducted,” SC’s global head of trade products Samuel Mathew saud. “The future of trade is going to be all about data,” he added.

 

Bank guarantees are a highly “paper-intensive” practice, the parties claimed in the release, with the industry first blockchain solution geared to substantially streamline current practices by “fully digiti[zing] the process, from initiation of the bank guarantee to the claim handling.”

“We believe that global trade is at the cusp of multi-level digital transformation which will revolutionise the entire business and operating model,” TradeIX CEO Rob Barnes remarked.

 

The development marks a significant application for R3’s Corda platform, after the Bank of Thailand’s announcement last week that it was utilizing the technology to create a central bank digital currency.